Best practices for using AWS StepFunctions

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In this post you will learn some of the best patterns/tricks author has learned during my time creating Step Functions workflows. By Lukas Fruntke.

Since it has been introduced in June Step Functions Workflow Studio proved its value to me several times. As its a low-code editor with the most common configurations already baked-in, the effort of writing/designing a workflow with Amazon States Language plummeted. Those minutes and hours handwriting workflows with 100 lines++ are finally over for good, which is something you must not ignore when dealing with Step Functions.

The main points captured in this article:

  • Make use of the Step Functions Workflow Studio
  • Utilize the service integrations
  • Use .waitForTaskToken
  • Make use of the inbuilt retries
  • Utilize Heartbeats to fail fast
  • Define a Catch Handler
  • Further reading

While AWS offers some 17 “optimized” service integrations (for the definitive list see here), that include different custom options of integrating with the specific services, AWS has released an option to call the APIs of nearly all AWS services directly, as described in this article. This allows you to scrap some of the utility lambdas one uses to add much-needed functionality-augmentation to a service and go with Step Function instead. You will also get links to further reading. Excellent!

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